Cloudflare Birthday Week 2025: What to Expect?

Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in Net. It is September the 19th, 2025 edition. We're back after our late August AI Week and this is the jewel of Cloudflare's Innovation Week's Birthday Week that is coming next week. We have Innovation Weeks all through the year and this is the biggest one. I'm your host João Tomé based in Lisbon, Portugal and with me I have Nikita Cano. Hello Nikita, how are you? Hi there, how is it going? I'm great. It's not a very sunny day in London but we're pushing through. Excited to be here. Exactly, you're in London so we're actually doing an European episode this time which is actually rare for me. I'm in Lisbon always in Europe but usually my guests are in the US or even Singapore sometimes. How excited are you for Birthday Week? I'm very excited because it's kind of more than just a celebration for us, right? It's a tradition that is deeply rooted in our mission of helping to build a better Internet. It's the moment where we give back to the community and to the customers and to the Internet itself and I'm myself all up for features that are used globally by everyone and I'm making everyone's life better so this is the most exciting time of the year for me personally as well. If you go back, we always had John Graham-Cumming, our previous CTO who is now on the board who always tutored that Universal SSL was launched during Birthday Week when we made encryption free for everyone on our network. We launched Unmetered, unlimited DDoS protection as well and now nobody is even questioning whether security is a right. It's not a privilege anymore, right? Our famous developer platform was launched during Birthday Week as well so we are gonna keep it going. We're continuing this tradition. True and the workers are developers but I think it's almost 10 years, I think it's 2016 so it's been a while and Cloudflare is celebrating 15 years so it's always a kind of a not completely round but at least like a big number and also I'm doing a This Week in Ed special episode on Sunday with Michelle Zetlin and Matthew Prince, our co -founders, all about how Cloudflare came to be 15 years ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco so stay tuned for that. For those, you are a Senior Product Manager, you're actually running with Corinne this week. What can folks expect from Birthday Week really? So we have a bunch of announcements that all tie back to our core mission, helping to build a better Internet and every day we're going to give back something special and every day has some sort of a theme, a core theme that everyone revolves around so for example on Monday you can expect stuff that is all about democratizing development. There will be a bunch of announcements that will make developer tools and products and features more accessible for everyone and we will focus on how we can improve the future of the Internet by making the tools that are available today easier to access for everyone. The Tuesday will be an interesting mix of announcements that are building a smarter, safer and more open Internet so you can expect things around AI crawlers which is the continuation from AI week and our summer announcements. If you're into vibe coding there will be something for you there as well which seems to be a topic du jour and everyone is excited about how democratized software engineering has become with vibe coding. There will be a couple of interesting partnerships with our fellow companies from different industries around how we can make the Internet more sustainable and collaborative. Wednesday will be about securing the future by default and you know that security isn't a feature at Cloudflare, it's our core principle. We put this at the core of everything we're doing so there will be a big some enterprise-grade announcements but also some massive stories around how we increase the security of everyone who is already using Cloudflare on free plan, on self-serve plans, on enterprise by building on top of the same encryption technology that we already use since Universal SSL and if post-quantum is your thing and you're interested in that there will be announcements around our advancements in post-quantum cryptography and securing the future there too. Thursday will be the dedicated spot for developer platforms so it will be all about building the future of development at Cloudflare Edge. There will be a bunch of partnerships, we will announce very exciting products that were very much awaited by the developer community on developer platform. There will be stuff around data pipelines, there will be stuff around transactional services, a bunch of partnerships with different companies in the industry and there will also be an announcement around how we make all of this more accessible as well which is something that I'm very excited about. And then after talking essentially throughout the entire week around security and development and say for what, we are going to talk about the engine that makes all of this possible, our connectivity cloud and our network. So we're going to tell you how we have improved the technology that powers our network both on layer 7 with HTTP request pipeline and some very low -level networking stack technologies. There will be some very deep technical dives published on our blog and we will go all around our technical stack exposing how we learn in real time using machine learning how and where to send data faster and how this benefits everyone right now and you don't need to even flip a switch. We're giving this away if you're with us, we've made you faster than you were yesterday just by shipping this today. And there will be some announcements for Cloudflare Raider which is one of my favorite things as well. So if you're a researcher or if you're interested in following the trends, especially the local trends on the Internet, there will be announcements for you in there. I know a lot about that because I work closely with the Raider team. It's a very full week and this actually reminds me of because I was editing some videos about Tech Crunch Disrupt 15 years ago where Cloudflare launched the announcement and one of the main things of that announcement was, hey it's free, our service is free and then it was like, how do you earn money? Hey, there's Pro of course, there's a full set of things that are free and that was from the get-go which is kind of interesting to see history in the making 15 years ago. More on that on Sunday. It's a great week and AI is always there, sometimes a little bit more diffused but it's always there, sometimes helping our own systems, other times just helping developers and others building gigantic models and doing very amazing things these days. If you had to resume the week this week in a sentence or a phrase or something like that, what would it be? That's a very good question. I think if I had to use one word for this, it will be diverse and I like that it's a very wide breadth of technologies and impactful initiatives that we are packing all together and for an insights group, we actually had a big problem of how we could group them logically together because we had so many announcements we wanted to bring to everyone that we had a hard time making sure that only the most important stuff gets on the lineup and that it's somewhat cohesive, that we're not jumping from AI to developer platform to performance and network in the same day so you could follow along how our product and our engineering teams sort of continuously develop the future. And there's also, and you mentioned this, a lot of giveaways in terms of making things free, better things for the Internet, free, available, fully available. PostQuantum is one of those and this week actually, because Apple launched iOS 26 now, that's the name, on Monday, PostQuantum cryptography, because Apple is supporting that, has actually increased the percentage and you can see that on radar specifically. That is over 45, I think, percent of web traffic coming through Koffler that is by now using PostQuantum ready encryption. Yeah, there will be big announcements around that and they will all follow the same sort of core improvement. We want to protect the future so that if anybody manages to capture your traffic today and it was encrypted, that no matter how far quantum compute advances in the next five years, nobody will be able to decrypt your today's conversations in five years. So we are trying to do this, not on one product, not on a single feature, but we are trying to go holistically around this and stay tuned for the announcements. That's true. Stay tuned, geek out, as we usually say. Oh, well, thank you, Nikita. This was great and looking forward to see the full week taking place. This is so exciting. Take a good look at the blog. Everything comes out in the morning of every day here at US time and this will be our greatest birthday week for sure. I hope so and I think so. By seeing the blogs, you can definitely see great announcements there. For those that want to track, you can check blog.koffler.com or our koffler.com slash birthday dash week hub, where you'll see videos and blog posts and all the content that we're posting out there, including press releases. Oh, well, it's done. Thank you, Nikita. Thank you. And that's a wrap.